“What about Libby Hatch?”

My friend goes a little pale and looks at me like maybe the old girl herself’s going to appear from inside the shop and let him have it if he says the wrong thing. Her name’ll produce that effect on anyone who ever crossed paths or purposes with her.

“Libby Hatch?” Mr. Moore echoes quietly. “No. No, you couldn’t. It’s not-well, it-well, you just couldn’t…” He keeps on in that vein until I get enough room in edgewise to ask exactly why you couldn’t. “Well,” he answers, still sounding like a half-terrified kid, “how could you-how could anyone-” And then some part of his brain that hasn’t been clouded by drink remembers that the woman’s been dead for better than twenty years: he puffs up his chest and gets a little bolder.

“In the first place,” he says (and up goes a finger, with more at the ready to indicate that there’s a whole arsenal of points coming), “I thought you were talking about a story that wouldn’t be as gruesome as Beecham’s. In the Hatch case you’ve not only got kidnappings, but murdered infants, grave robbing-and we did the grave robbing, for God’s sake-”

“True,” I say, “but-” But there’s no buts-Mr. Moore is not letting reason get into this. Up bangs another finger, and he bulls on:

“Second, the moral implications”-he does love that little phrase-“of the Hatch case are, if anything, even more disturbing than those of the Beecham affair.”

“That’s right,” I chime in, “and that’s just why-”

“And finally,” he booms, “even if the story weren’t so damned horrifying and disturbing, you, Stevie Taggert, would not be the man to tell it.”

This point I find a little confusing. It hasn’t actually occurred to me that I am the man to tell the story, but I don’t much like the statement that I couldn’t be. Seems to imply something.